


Scar Tissue

by mnemosyne



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Constantine (TV)
Genre: Arrow S4 spoilers, Gen, mild Zed/John if you squint at it a bit, not a fix it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 14:24:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12234693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemosyne/pseuds/mnemosyne
Summary: In which John Constantine talks to Laurel Lance and knows that the world has changed. Spoilers for Arrow season 4.





	Scar Tissue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alchemise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts).



“Are you ready?”

“No.”

John grins, lazy and slow. “Me neither,” he says with an elaborate wink. Laurel raises one eyebrow and John laughs, as if delighted at the determined jut of her jaw.

“This has better work,” she tells him, shaking her head. There’s worry behind the bite, John knows, worry, and something else he is less keen to put a name to. He lifts his hands to her, placating.

“Prepare to be amazed,” he says, and pauses, rolls up his sleeves. “Dazzled with the show, even.” The heel of Laurel’s shoe taps a sharp tattoo against stone floor. “I’ll take mildly impressed,” John allows. He thinks he can see the ghost of a smile somewhere crossing the lines of her mouth and he’ll take that, he’ll take that, for now.

The room is cold, clinical, the flicker of the candle he has asked Laurel to hold the only movement suggesting any kind of life. The wax dripping against her fingers doesn’t seem to bother her, and John feels a small shiver passing through the air around him which has as much to do with the temperature as the bile in the back of his throat has to do with the onion rings he had stolen from Chaz’s plate earlier.

If Laurel sees his discomfort, she doesn’t show it, watching as he complete the ritual with an impassive scepticism. It’s a bit much for a woman who he literally dragged into the afterlife to help save her sister, he grumbles to himself, before purging all thoughts but those of the words that are dripping, burning from his lips.

The candle in Laurel’s hands flares bright, orange, blue, white.

“Keep that safe,” John warns.

Laurel's teeth gleam in the sudden light. “Always,” she replies. “See you soon, John.”

The candle flares again, John closes his eyes involuntarily against the glare.

She will be gone when he opens them again.

Zed is waiting for him when he returns. No, Zed is there when he returns. None of her unhurried movements as she glances up to the door, then unfurls her legs from the sofa suggest that she has been in any way holding out for his return. She nods her head towards the small kitchenette.

“Coffee’s on,” she says. “You look like shit.”

“It’s only because I feel like a dog ran me over in a combine harvester,” John agrees. The coffee is thick, black sludge, the way Zed likes it and the way he tolerates because it is at least doing its job of scraping the taste of brimstone from his tongue. Zed’s sketchbook lies open on the counter next to him, as if she had forgotten it was there. John knows she knows he knows her better than that.

Laurel’s eyes stare up at him from the page, the same brightness he remembers, but Zed’s clever lines have caught a cruelty in the twist of her mouth, a deeper darkness in the shadow of pain which lies just beneath the surface of her features.

“You know this woman?” Zed asks, padding softly behind him. John studies the drawing, tilts it so the light moves over the rough grain of the paper.

“Maybe,” he allows.

“There’s darkness around her.”

“These days there’s darkness around all of us, love,” he says. He waves his coffee cup in Zed’s general direction. “What have you been doing all day?” he asks, and she frowns at his deflection.

“You’re hiding something.”

She doesn’t ask, Zed rarely asks. He takes another sip of coffee and from the way she looks at him, she must know that he is stalling. The coffee feels grainy, like too much sand between his teeth. “I think by now you might try to trust me a little.”

She moves closer to him, pours herself a cup of the same rocket fuel into a chipped, brown-stained mug. Her movements are methodical, like the act requires her full attention. He could love that about her, the way she’s so aware in everything she does.

“She’s a friend of a friend,” he says at last. “At least, I think she is.” He remembers shades swirling at the edges of the chamber. Watching. Waiting? “We needed to speak.”

“What about?”

He shrugs. “What does anyone ever need to speak to the dead about? The living.”

He picks the paper up; the dampness of the counter-top causing it to stick slightly. Water is seeping through a patch of Laurel’s hair, the careful lines beginning to billow into black oil-slick cloud.

“There’s something wrong with the world,” Zed says, carefully. She’s standing close enough now that he can smell her perfume, bright and cleansing. It’s a fight not to breathe it in, let the last remnants of the ritual place wash clear from his lungs. “Things are changing, and I don’t know what.”

“Things always change.”

“Not like this.” She’s frowning again, and he knows it’s not at him. It’s the face she makes when the physical world lacks the necessary ways to articulate the universe inside her heart and her mind, when she disappears inside herself, searching for the right words, the right phrases. “It’s like the whole world is different,” she says. “I feel it, but I...”

She falls silent, steps away from him. His body mourns the loss of her closeness, but he stays still, swirling black coffee almost-nonchalantly around his mug.

“I know, love,” he says. If he’s honest with himself, which he tries not to be on principle, he’s lying to her, one more in a sea of many. But something in him understands, can feel different and wrong hovering at the corners of his magic. He sets his coffee mug back down on the counter, and before he can stop himself, reaches out to grip Zed by the shoulder.

Her head tilts up, and not for the first time he wishes he knew what it was she saw when she looked at him. Or perhaps he doesn’t wish that at all, doesn’t ever want to take that piece of knowledge into his own self. Something like light dawns in Zed’s eyes.

“Bringing her back, is that really the right thing to do?” She asks, before he can say anything.

“Raising the dead is a fool’s game,” John replies.


End file.
